My learning was not at all restricted to the classroom. I loved anything that was in English: books, magazines, songs, and especially movies. I grew up watching a lot of TV and I watched a movie almost every afternoon. However, because these were on open TV they were all dubbed in Portuguese. That disappointed me a lot because I wanted to hear the real voices and the real language. I then started to rent a lot of movies that were not dubbed. I was very particular about the kind of movies I rented. I really like comedy and science fiction. While watching movies I made an effort to try and focus on the spoken English instead of on the Portuguese captions. At first I could not understand much, but I had the felling that, even though I did not understand most of the language, there was something going on in my brain. I liked some movies so much that I watched some of them several times. Every time I watched a movie again I picked up new expressions or learned new words.

Another way I learned a lot outside the classroom was through the computer. Not using those expensive CD-ROM courses but by using software, playing games, and surfing the web. Because of this, learning was accidental. I and my friends always had the latest computer games and they were always in English. This learning was different from the one through movies because it involved a lot of interaction. One of these, a strategy game called Starcraft from Blizzard Entertainment, is remarkable because the learning that took place resembled very much that of an English course. I remember there was a lot of repetition of some sentences during the game. These were warnings that told the player to take an action, e.g. “Additional supply depots required.” These phrases stuck in my head and I still remember all of them. In addition to being spoken, these warnings also appeared on the screen so I had both written and spoken language. This allowed me learn very important things such as the silent "t" in the word "depot" in the example above. Another apect of this game that helped my learning was the use I made of cheat codes. Specifically on this game, the codes were phrases such as "black sheep wall" and if I misspelled a word it would not work. I used to type these codes many times during a game which made me learn the spelling of many English words.

I also learned alot of English through songs from American and British bands. I listened to a lot of those and I never liked Brasilian music. My favorite kind of music was rock whose lyrics usually have a lot of slang and I think this helped me a lot in my ability to speak and understand informal English. I always liked to listen to the songs and read the lyrics because I couldn't understand them just by listening. One of my favorite bands when I was a teenager was Nirvana. As most of the kids my age, I knew all the songs from the album Nervermind.  Although there was a lot of language input on these songs I soon understood that they were not reliable for learning since they were informal English. An example is the song Jesus don't want me for a sunbean (watch the video).